Sharon Graham sounds brilliant.
Unite’s leader, Sharon Graham, is leading the charge against 21st-century corporations. Why isn’t Labour following suit, asks Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty
www.theguardian.com
Since taking over eight months ago, Graham has led 52,000 members into more than 300 disputes. Of those that have been resolved, Unite has won three out of four. In the past few months alone, workers at Gatwick have scored a
21% pay rise, those at Devonport dockyard in Plymouth have
won 13%, and employees at the BMW Mini plant in Oxford have
accepted a 21% rise over the next three years. She has pioneered a strategy called leverage. When battling multinationals, she will call in forensic accountants (Unite has just hired its own) and other analysts to go through every detail of the company, its owners and shareholders and their various advisers.
Documents are produced over many weeks that stretch to many hundreds of pages. Then a “dirt dossier” is put together, and Graham and her team start pushing on contractors, clients and foreign governments considering giving business to her corporate opponents. It has proved to be a devastatingly successful strategy. She has warned City analysts that Unite’s response to British Airways’
fire and rehire policy will damage its business, and has lobbied the Norwegian government against awarding a contract to a bus company. And time and again, she has won.
Many academics and commentators look on modern financialised businesses and produce a literature of despair. I have made my own contributions to that particular bookshelf. But Graham is the first person I have met who has looked at how the modern corporation is globalised, outsourced and often dependent on states, and turned those very factors against it.